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Learn Digital Marketing Strategy

“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”
–Sun Tzu

Strategy is one of the most overused and yet least understood words in business. Add the word “digital” in front of it and the false beliefs and fairy tales multiply exponentially.

One of the most important aspects of your job as a digital marketer comes down to education. Given the breakneck speed of the space and constant change, you not only have to learn digital marketing strategy but also keep your key stakeholders and decision makers up to speed.

Often times, people will skip the strategy and jump right to the results. Conversations like this take place everyday from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Decision maker: “How much can we expect to make for investing in this SEO campaign thingy?”

Digital marketer: “Well. That depends. What are we trying to achieve?”

Decision maker: “That should be obvious – more sales.”

Digital marketer: “Okay, I agree but after they find our website – why will they buy from us?”

Decision maker: “That’s why I hired you.”

And so it goes. The digital marketer is left to sprinkle some fairy dust on the website and “poof!” magically sales climb in a nice linear relationship to the amount of dollars invested. There is little consideration to the customer experience with the brand.

But as we’ve seen, no amount of smart digital marketing can make up for a poor product or service experience. Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare are all just a click or swipe away for the customer and they will let the world know their thoughts at or even before the time of purchase.

When the cost of just one poor customer experience is figured into the mix and the web’s ability to amplify this out, it becomes incredibly expensive to fail.

As a result, a huge shift is underway in how to approach the entire customer experience ecosystem. As we’ve seen, the web strips away price as a competitive advantage (someone will always do it for cheaper via a Google search). The SERPs show instantly the brand reviews and if a company takes care of its customers.

So, building strong brands comes down to a smart strategy. The digital tools are there to support a business objective but it must be clearly defined up front.

The digital marketer must consistently make an effort to educate decision-makers on this brave new world. The stakes are higher than ever and the feedback loop so tight, that a poor strategy becomes quickly exposed.

Online Marketing Research Framework

The shift to digital marketing has created an explosion of data. Whereas with traditional advertising we might have a longer feedback loop with less granularity into what is working, digital gives us near instant results. The tradeoff for this can be a firehouse of data streaming at the digital marketer.

The tools and concepts we’ve covered in this section can be overwhelming. Let’s take a step back and provide a framework for how to leverage this data versus drown in it.

Getting Customer Insights

The crux of online marketing is empathy. Know your user and what their pain points are and you can develop content and social media activities that speak to them. Ignore this simple idea and it’s likely a huge waste of time and money will be the result.

Tools: User Persona, Social Technographics

Understand Why People Go Online

It has been said people go online for two simple reasons: to answer a question or get an update.

For many brands answering a question is a tremendously powerful way to engender loyalty by educating them and providing value up front. This typically happens on-site and the device of the user may be a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.

For the user scenario of getting updates, this is where Social Media and Email Marketing can serve a valuable purpose. Use the Social Technographics tool to set expectations here.

It All Starts with Keywords

Think back to ZMOT and the rise of the amount of searches people make prior to a purchase. Being present at the ZMOT in the search results is consistently one of the most cost-effective ways to acquire customers today. Here again, the user persona helps guide what content needs to be created to earn this engagement.

But as we’ve seen, just putting up a website doesn’t guarantee traffic or engagement. The Beginner’s Guide to SEO showed us how important things like links and optimizing each page for search is critically important for climbing in the rankings. The Long Tail approach to picking keywords is particularly powerful for driving up traffic across a plethora of keyword phrases.

Tools: Google Keyword Tool, Google Trends, Compete.com, Open Site Explorer, SEOmoz toolbar

The Foundation

Digital marketing is inherently driven by technology. Technology can be expensive (but is always falling due to Moore’s Law). However, custom-built technology requires highly-skilled labor which is very costly. Doing our homework upfront helps ensure we don’t custom build an online brand experience that nobody will interact with. Facebook, Gmail and Twitter are very real competitors for anybody online as they suck up so much of our time.

Our next section will deal with Strategy and by doing our Research first, we’re in a great position to make calculated guesses for acquiring people’s attention and hopefully converting it into revenue (the whole goal of marketing, same as it ever was regardless of the technology involved).

How To Research Competitive Site Traffic and Social Engagement

Now you’ve done your initial homework for keywords and have no doubt that your site will dominate the SERPs for a myriad of Long Tail phrases.

At this point, it’s helpful to set expectations by doing a little competitive research around what your peers are experiencing for traffic and social engagement. Luckily, we have a few free tools at our disposal.

Alexa – Owned by Amazon, this service ranks the world’s most visited websites based on a variety factors. Helpful for getting a sense of inbound links to the site and where a site ranks across all websites online. Using unique visitors as of spring 2013, Google ranks first, followed by Facebook and YouTube. This is good for a big picture view. Cracking the Alexa Top 100 is a big deal for consumer websites.
Compete.com – Free for basic information, Compete gives you a sense of overall unique visitors to a website broken down month by month. Keep in mind, this is only an approximation. But still helpful for setting traffic goals when you’re starting out or relaunching a web property. For small sites, there might not be enough traffic to generate a report.
Open Site Explorer – As we know from our SEO chapter, inbound links are a critical part for ranking better. SEOmoz has put together a free tool that helps you explore a variety of SEO factors, as well as social engagement (Pro Version). Here’s a great overview on how it works.
SEOmoz toolbar – This free plugin for Chrome or Firefox let’s you quickly see a variety of SEO elements page by page. The video at the above link does a good job explaining how it works.
Social Media – Knowing your target market, you can select the right social channels they most likely engage with. Facebook and YouTube is usually a given and increasingly so is Twitter. Emerging channels like Pinterest or foursquare can be worth looking into as well. Spend some time looking through your competitors’ Likes, Followers, Subscribers but also dig deeper and see if they are getting good engagement with their online community (Retweets, Comments, etc). A great example of a company that enjoys fantastic engagement on social is New Belgium Brewing.

Key Takeaway: There is a ton of data to be had – and usually for free. However, don’t let it overwhelm you to the point you have “paralysis by analysis”. Pick 3 – 5 top competitors in your field and build a simple matrix that let’s you see their overall traffic, SEO performance and social media traction.

How To Use Google Trends for SEO

All this keyword research is great but what if we could get a sense of how keywords perform over time? Are there any predictable patterns around seasonality? For example, how does a phrase like “best ski resort” change over the course of a year?

Such knowledge can be particularly helpful for running paid search campaigns (more on that later) or planning an editorial calendar for blogging for maximizing our chances of showing up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).

Enter Google Trends – this gives us a glimpse of how keywords perform over time – often several years back (an eternity on the web). In addition, the tool provides us with information around geography and related terms.

For the phrase: “Best Ski Resorts”

We quickly see that there is indeed a peak and valley around this phrase – no big surprise of course.

The power of the tool comes in for assessing keyword phrases over each other for getting a quick sense of volume.

Adding in a second phrase like “Ski Resort Vacations” as the red line we see:

Same cyclical nature but the search volume is several magnitudes different.

The tool goes on to give us clues around various other keyword phrases. We can add these into our Keyword Ideas spreadsheet that we’ve been building and even cross-check these phrases using the AdWords Keyword Tool. This also provides us clues into what our consumer are interested in as they perform their Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) research.

A Measure of Market Demand?

Using Google Trends you can also extrapolate out around if there is truly a market opportunity for your business service or product. If the search volume is declining down and to the right for a variety of phrases around your offering you know that people are searching less for this topic. There can be a host of reasons for this but it might be time to stop and rethink if you truly have momentum.

At the same time when you identify phrases that differ dramatically in volume and are trending up and to the right over time you can zero in on topics that are worth creating content around because there is proof of a market demand.

What a powerful tool and you can read more on how to use it here.

Leveraging your newly formed SEO skills, you can start to pull in traffic for those searches.

But the decision-maker will inevitably ask, “Great, but how do we stack up against our competitors?”

How to do Keyword Research

The “Affliction vs. Aspiration” whiteboard keyword brainstorm exercise helps us get creative around potential topics for content. This is the art part of our search marketing efforts.

Now, we will apply some science using some free tools from Google for collecting real data.

At this point, our goal is to try and understand to the best of our ability the ways people will search for our product or service.

Let’s start with Google’s Keyword Tool. This powerful (and free) tool allows us to research the rough volume of keyword phrases and how popular those searches are. Which means we can enter various search terms and get ideas on what other terms users may be searching for that we wouldn’t have normally considered.

As a bonus, we can also use a handy export feature and dump these into our keyword spreadsheet we are building.

Note: You will likely have to sign up for an AdWords account to have access to the tool.

Once logged in, click on “Tools” and select Keyword Planner from the dropdown.

Next, click on the “Search for new keyword using a phrase, website or category”

Now, enter a few keywords in the dropdown box. In our case we’ll explore “best ipad case” and click the Get Ideas button. (Don’t worry about any of the other filters and options right now.)

And now we can see a massive range of keyword volume for phrases around “best ipad case”…

What This Means

Terms that are highly competitive with a high Cost-Per-Click (CPC) will most likely be tough to rank on organically via SEO. However, they are also very likely to convert traffic (which is why they cost so much to bid on for a click – more on Paid Search in a minute).

What we notice in this quick exercise is that there are various keyword searches going on around specific types of iPads. We have the iPad Air and iPad 2 showing up with quite a range of volume that the tool defaults tool (after all, this is free data so we might not get as tight of a range as we’d like).

However, you can use these variations as additional ideas to add to your keyword brainstorm list.

How to use Keyword Data for organic SEO in short:

Enter your keyword phrase (in this example we used “best ipad cases”).
Look at the Keyword ideas.
Remember if it’s a generic Fat Head term and the competition is high, it will be tough to rank in the “organic” results. An example would be “ipad 2 cases”.
Sift through the results and look for ways to match High Competition keyword phrases with Low Competition.
An example might be something like “reviews for best ipad 2 cases for business travelers”. Now that’s getting much closer to the Long Tail.
Enter this keyword phrase into your target keyword spreadsheet under the appropriate category.
In this example, if we were selling iPad cases, we might do a blog post reviewing the pros and cons of different iPad cases for professionals who are using their iPad for business on the go.
We will track the performance of this blog post over time in relation to this keyword phrase. (More on how exactly to do this in the Measurement section).
Pick another phrase and enter it into the tool.
Look at the results. Try and mash up interesting combinations of high and low competition – these are your Long Tail phrases. File away in your spreadsheet.
Rinse and repeat.

Key takeaway: It’s easy to get all giddy with this type of data. Do not forsake your user now though. Think content that educates and helps solve their Aspirations and Afflictions needs. If you do this well, the traffic will come and with a little luck you might end up being three or four sources of information used in the customer’s .

You should now have a pretty diverse spreadsheet full of various keyword phrases with a blend of art and science. From the whiteboard exercise and the Keyword Tool, these should fall neatly into various buckets and as a bonus you can have a sense of difficulty for ranking and rough volume.

For example, the “best iPad cases” might have a content category related to business travel. Within this, there could be blog posts and tips around keyboard options, charging the iPad for international flights, screen covers, must-have apps for productivity, and interviews.

Another example would be something more broad such as “Additional Accessories to Review”. We could do a series of blog posts based on different keyword searches related to accessories. The keyword research shows things like speakers and waterproof cases to be of interest.

How to do brand first impressions research for digital

The previous analog research exercise is important for a couple of reasons. First, it provides another chance to empathize with our user by reacquainting ourselves with their persona. Second, it forces us to think through and identify why they are going to a search page to get answers. Both of these make it easier for us to feed the content beast.

Next, we will take an inventory of where our brand equity currently sits. Customers today are forming their first impressions of your brand on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It is not happening in a print ad. Or even on your website. It’s happening here on the SERPs and if you do not have a good handle on how your brand is coming across, the hill just got steeper for getting people to engage with you online.

Poor product reviews, negative comments, lack of credible 3rd party sources all send social proof of what your brand is all about.

Note: You should have your handy keyword spreadsheet nearby as you do this exercise.

Armed with these brainstorms, we can go to a couple free tools to get better insights into how we might go after keyword phrases. From Zero Moment of Truth:

Step 1: Autocomplete on a search engine
This deceptively simple tool can reveal some big insights for how your customers are seeing you on the SERPs. This is truly ground zero for brand first impressions and can be a humbling experience if you have not been paying attention to your online efforts. Remember, it is never too late to start moving the needle.

Type in your product or service name and see what search terms fill in automatically. These represent where the majority of searches are taking place since they are the most popular terms.
Does your site or brand appear in the top third of the first results page for these searches?
If present, does your brand show up in the ratings and reviews for your category?
If you brand is local, be sure to enter a geography qualifier into the query (Ex. “best hair salon in Pasadena”). This is particular powerful for seeing user reviews and ratings.

Step 2: Brand Image Search Exercise

Enter “Your Brand Name” – what do the results say? Don’t flinch.
Enter “Your Brand Name” Review – what does it say?
Best “Your Category” – who shows up?

Step 3: Look at Paid Search Ads

Do you see a lot of ads above the results and off to the side? This means the keyword is pretty valuable and likely to generate a click-thru. It will also likely be tough to rank on.
What type of content and calls to action are they using?

Any ideas pop up? Create a separate tab called “Opportunities” in your spreadsheet and list anything you see that sparks an opportunity.

Wait, what is an opportunity?

These might be blogs you see for Your Category search that you could approach for possibly guest-blogging or coverage of your brand.
Reviews or ratings on your brand that need to be addressed in the conversation.
Ideas for content creation around forums or questions. Yahoo! Answers, Quora, and even Wikipedia is great for this.
Major competitors not yet identified through traditional competitive audits.

Cross-check this with your first tab on your keyword phrases that you brainstormed off the user persona. What holds true? What needs to be added?

Next up, we will dive into pulling actual search data into our research efforts.